Ecocritical Reading of James Camerons "Avatar"

Kira Fleckenstein

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Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Cultural Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, Ruhr-University of Bochum, language...

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Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Cultural Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, Ruhr-University of Bochum, language: English, abstract: This paper is meant to depict in which ways popular culture is dealing with ecocritic questions and motifs of anthropocentrism. 'Avatar' by James Cameron has been chosen as an object of investigation, since it is a piece of popular culture which has attained a massive popularity at the end of the previous decade. It can therefore be seen as a rather modern representation of our society, keeping in mind that the movie has met a greatly positive resonance within a worldwide audience, occupying the first position in the box-office index 'Top 100 - Films of all time worldwide gross' and has obtained 73 awards and another 148 nominations. The environmental message behind it can easily be assumed by the average spectator and has also been discussed by Cameron himself during several interviews, but this essay plans on further analyzing the different motifs used in this work which contribute to this perception, regarding elements of ecocriticism and representations of anthropocentrism within the story and its realization. The plan is to have a look at articles published by popular magazines dealing with the perception and potential messages behind the movie and to do an ecocritical reading of the movie with these perceptions in mind. On the one hand, the movie has enjoyed an overall positive resonance and high rankings by movie critics. One could argue that the underlying environmental message has raised awareness for the preciousness and vulnerability of the world we live in, which can be seen in the amount of environmental discussions evoked by the film and its plenty reviews dealing with the intended message behind the story. Manola Dargis has argued that "with blue people and pink blooms he [Cameron] has confirmed its [cinema's] wonder", other critics such as Michael Graham Richard have called it a "Big Movie with Big Environmental themes" and noted that "it's pretty obvious that the movie has an important green theme". Usually, movies and other literary works conveying "big themes" do not gain positive resonance only, and that is what the paper is interested in.